The "Hamlet" in this well-mounted Italian spoof is the Danish prince, not a small town or village. The movie irreverently draws on both the Shakespeare play and the 1877 story by Jules Laforgue. In the story, Hamlet (Carmelo Bene) is a would-be playwright. He suffers from inept Freudian analysis by Polonius (Pippo Tuminelli), and Ophelia and Gertrude (Isabella Russo & Luciana Cante) are women conjured up in his erotic imagination.
When World War II breaks out, two German lovers are cruelly separated. While he is sent to fight at the front, she, a Jewish girl, is sent to a concentration camp where humiliation and death have been elevated to a sinister art.
